Pottermania is nigh

June 29 and July 21 could well be two defining moments in human history. For 2007, anyways! The first date marks the launch of the much-anticipated, over-hyped, over-reported Apple iPhone while the second one is for the launch of the last book in the Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). The world could well be divided over which on to concentrate on and as the book launch draws closer, Harry will definitely be top of the charts, er, headlines again.

But with over a month to go, there is already a claim about the ending of the new book. "Gabriel", a hacker claims to have broken into the computer of Bloomsbury Publishing and obtained a copy of the book and has put on the ending on his site (we shall not link to it!). I remember when the earlier books were being released, a lot of spoilers would make the rounds. Some believable and some, not so! I even had a boss who emailed the whole company with the ending to "save precious time"! Gabriel the hacker, too, has similar intentions:

"We make this spoiler to make reading of the upcoming book useless and boring," Gabriel said in the posting.

One of the main points of contention with book seven is who will die. From being a children’s fantasy book, the more recent Potter books have grown darker as Harry gets older. And there is speculation that Harry or one of his close buddies is going to die. Gasp! And the popularity is definitely higher than that of network security topics according the host of the ‘spoiler’!

Our bandwidth graph shows that Harry Potter is a little more popular than our normal topic of network security[!]

What is certain is that the PR machine has kicked in and starting July, one can expect a whole lot of spoilers, hack attacks, reported leaks and stolen books!

Photo: Wikipedia.org

Tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows, Hack Attack, Spoiler, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, iPhone